The document is a presentation about search and interaction design. It discusses how search has evolved from just putting a search box on a site to being a complex interaction design problem. It covers how search engines work through crawling, indexing, and algorithms. It also addresses the differences between enterprise search, used by customers and employees within an organization, compared to public web search engines. The presentation emphasizes that search is about understanding user intentions and providing choices, and that designers need to focus on the human aspect of search, not just the technical implementation.

1. Search: The Purest Expression of
Interaction Design
UX Week 2007
Wednesday, August 15
Chiara Fox
chiara@adaptivepath.com

2. An IA Speaking on IxD?
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3. What’s So Hard About Search?
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4. Just Slap a Search Box On There
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5. There’s More To It Than That
• Understanding what happens behind the scenes will
make us better designers.
• We need to know the limitations and restrictions
ourselves, not take vendors’ or IT’s word for it.
• The end user must still come first.
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6. Search Affects Everyone
• Not just an IT problem.
• Not just an information architecture or findability
problem.
• It’s also an interaction design problem.
• AND IT’S STILL NOT SOLVED!
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7. Search = Information Retrieval
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8. How Search Basically Works
Searching
Indexing
Crawling
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9. Spider Crawls Content
Content
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10. Algorithm(s) Process & Build Index
?
Index
UX Week 2007 – Search: The Purest Expression of Interaction Design

11. Search Index to Retrieve Results
query terms Search Index Results
Set
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12. So Really...
• All searches are database lookups
Database
Index
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13. Okay, Not Really...
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15. Algorithms Are the Secret Sauce
• Natural language processing
• Pattern matching
• Full text search
• Page Rank
• Stemming
• and more...
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16. Page Rank Isn’t the (Only) Answer
• Page Rank says the importance of a page is judged by
the number of pages linking to it as well as their
importance.
• Most popular doesn’t automatically mean the most
relevant.
• Really only works for web content. Intranets don’t
link to content the way the blog-o-sphere does.
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17. We Need Basic Literacy
• As designers, we need to understand the basics of
how these algorithms work.
• Gives us power when we go to IT. They don’t hold all
the knowledge – it’s partnership.
• This stuff is hard – they aren’t going to offer to do
more work for us unless we ask, and know what to
ask for.
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18. Enterprise Search Web Search
local search tool(s) 3rd party engines
customers or employees anyone
structured & unstructured unstructured content
control over content no content control
insight into user tasks hard to know tasks
tune engine for specific tune engine for generic
needs tasks
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19. Enterprise Search Can Suck
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20. Can Also Allow for Refinement
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21. It’s About Intention & Context
• When we know what people want to do, we are
better able to give them the tools to do it.
• Easier to sniff out intention with a closed audience or
within a narrow context.
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22. General Web Search Is Different
• Google, MSN and Yahoo! can’t know the context,
intent or the user.
• Must try to be all things to all people.
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23. Where Can We Have Most Impact?
• On our own site searches.
• In vertical web searches.
• On our intranets.
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24. Search Experience Effects Site Use
• Interactions with the site search influences how you
use the site.
• How can we make it so search is “quality time” for
the user?
• “I won’t search on their support site because I get poor
results.”
• “Why can’t it just work like Google?”
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26. Search Has Changed Our Behavior
• We don’t use encyclopedias anymore.
• “Google” is a verb that appears in prime time TV.
• 2-, 3- or 4-word phrases are used as queries in 72%
of searches. 1-word queries account for only 13.5%.*
• Search is seen as an “escape hatch” when browsing
navigation doesn’t work.
• We need to work with these changes.
* According to European Web analytics provider OneStat in January 2007.
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27. It’s How We Use the Tools We Have
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28. We Aren’t Using What We Got
• We don’t need to throw out our current search
engine for the latest Google Box.
• Looking at the user expereince of search and making
changes there can drastically improve things.
• The algorithms are good at finding stuff - we need to
be better about putting it in context.
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29. Search is About Choice
• It’s more than a tool to get stuff done or find things.
• It allows us to pick and choose out of all the
information that is out there, the bits that are
relevant to us, right now.
• It’s how we learn what is available.
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31. Focus on the Humans
• Search should change to support me, the user. I
shouldn’t have to change to use search.
• The focus should be on the humans, not the
machines. The machines are dumb.
• We are not using the machines for what they are
best at.
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32. Search Engines Can’t Tell Intent
blue suede shoes Search
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33. Starting to See Web Search Change
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34. The Future
• Search not for answers, but people.
• On the social web, will search become “word of
mouth?”
• Visual search will be more & more important.
• Think of all the cool Web 2.0 applications and
widgets that exist now. How will we search for them?
• The Semantic Web
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35. References to Learn More
• CMS Watch. The Enterprise Search Report. http://www.cmswatch.com/
Search/Report/
• Search Tools website. http://www.searchtools.com/
• Search Engine Watch website. http://searchenginewatch.com/
• Baeza-Yates,Ricardo, Ribeiro-Neto, Berthier. Modern Information
Retrieval. Addison Wesley Longman, 1999.
• Battelle, John. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of
Business and Transformed Our Culture. Penguin Group, 2005.
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36. Photo Credits - Thanks Flickr!
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/geeknerd99/171659283/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/84178472@N00/416540994/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/bobydimitrov/492618684/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/simonaghita/469780760/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/gomattolson/187774538/
• http://www.flickr.com/photos/book_slut/92868417/
• http://xkcd.com/155/
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37. Thank you!
Chiara Fox
chiara@adaptivepath.com
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